


Faithless

by Defira



Category: Star Wars: The Old Republic
Genre: Gen, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-25
Updated: 2013-09-25
Packaged: 2017-12-27 14:37:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/980072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Defira/pseuds/Defira
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It feels like a thousand years since she accepted her place in Intelligence, a bright eyed recruit on her first solo mission. The end of the road is so very close at hand- but for Aranth'ess'anrokini, she cannot escape the stigma of being Cipher Nine no matter how hard she tries.</p>
<p>End game spoilers for Agent storyline</p>
            </blockquote>





	Faithless

Thessa felt the moment when her whole world shifted sideways- as if it hadn’t done enough of that over the last few months anyway. She was exhausted, emotionally destroyed, and she was beyond done with conspiracies and secrets and death. Her white uniform, once crisply white and worn as a symbol of pride, was blood splattered and singed from laser fire, an apt metaphor for how battered her soul felt. 

She needed for this to be the end, she needed for it to be over. And yet...

She swallowed around the emotions blocking her throat. “Could... could you say that again?”

Kothe’s eyes were sympathetic, gentle even, though his body language was clearly uncomfortable. “I asked if you’d be willing to work with me in the future,” he said carefully, hands clasped casually in front. He was doing his best to look relaxed, to look at ease, but he was still breathing heavily from the fight with the two Sith agents. “To join the Republic, and work as a true double agent this time.”

“Careful, love,” Vector murmured at her back. “Remember who you are.”

Thessa tried to blink away the newest batch of tears and found that there were too many; it seemed she hadn’t quite hit rock bottom as of yet. Not when she could break down and start sobbing in front of a man who should be her enemy.

Enemy... it was a funny word that. She honestly couldn’t say she knew the meaning of it anymore.

She smeared a hand against her cheek awkwardly, trying to wipe away the worst of the tears. “Vector,” she rasped, ashamed of how her voice shook, “I need to speak to Ardun, alone.”

Her shame spiralled faster at the soft touch in the centre of her back. “We will wait for you outside,” he said, without hesitation. That he would trust her so fervently, after all this time- she didn’t know whether it was an endearing indication of his love for her, or if that stubborn naivety of his still held on. 

She envied him that innocence.

His footsteps were the only sound apart from the crackle of the energy field around the codex and the distant hum of immense engines, and Thessa found she couldn’t look at Kothe even after the doors sealed shut behind Vector. 

Silence, heavy and oppressive, rose up between them. The faint hiss and crackle of the seal around the codex nagged at her, refusing to give her a moment of peace; there were decisions to be made, awful painful things to consider that would change the fate of entire worlds.

Trillions of lives, potentially.

Tears burned at her eyes again, and she closed them as tightly as she could, trying to deny them. 

Kothe broke the awkward silence by clearing his throat. “So,” he said conversationally, his voice echoing in the vast chamber, “who are you, really?”

Thessa was taken aback by the casual change of direction, and she blinked in confusion, finally turning to face him. “Beg pardon?”

“Your boyfriend there said-”

It was a stupid detail to latch on to, so very minor in the grand scheme of things, but she desperately needed an outlet for the anger sizzling within her as well. “Vector is my _husband_ ,” she snapped, the words coming out almost like a snarl, “and I’ll _thank_ you to speak of him with _respect_.”

He held up his hands in entreaty immediately. “Ain’t got nothing but respect for the man who helped you stay sane through this whole mad mess,” he said apologetically. “But he told you to remember who you are. So I have to wonder, Agent- who are you, really?”

Somewhat embarrassed by her outburst, Thessa felt her anger deflate. “I’m sure you have a rather detailed file on me, Ardun,” she said, somewhat bitterly. “I don’t see how I need to explain myself to you, of all people.”

His lips twisted wryly. “That’s a fair criticism,” he said, “I’ve not particularly given you a reason to trust me so far.”

“No,” she said bluntly, “you haven’t.”

Kothe breathed out slowly, and something about his body language changed; he seemed less intimidating, like he was taking up less space. She wondered whether it was a Jedi trick, or whether years of carefully considering his every move had given him such immense control; she wondered how paranoid she’d become that she noticed it instantly, how easy it was to read him. 

“You are Aranth’ess’anrokini, of the Chiss Ascendancy,” he said slowly, his hands held loosely at his sides.

Her mouth twitched almost unconsciously. “You pronounced my name correctly,” she said, somewhere between surprise and bitterness. 

He shrugged, and glanced over his shoulder. “Always did bug me, people who couldn’t make the effort like that,” he said, stooping wearily to take a seat on the steps leading up to the centre of the chamber. He gestured to the space beside him, as if to indicate she should sit too, as if they were old friends sitting down to reminisce rather than bloodied enemies with a complicated and painful past. 

“You’d be surprised,” she said, laughing shakily and then feeling bereft. After a moment’s hesitation, she sank down onto the steps- not quite as close as Kothe had intended, probably, but she wasn’t comfortable sitting any closer. “It’s been a long time since someone made the effort.”

Kothe’s eyebrows shot up. “That boy of yours doesn’t-?”

“Oh no, no I didn’t mean it like that.” Stumbling and tongue tied while trying to talk about her husband with an enemy Jedi- wasn’t she a sublime agent of the empire. “I just... I’m rather accustomed to people seeing me and seeing my skin and my name and just...”

“Not making the effort,” he finished for her.

“Exactly,” she said.

“You’re used to having people overlook you,” he said knowingly.

Something in his expression made her insides twist up painfully. “Just another alien, sir,” she said quietly, glancing away and feeling more awkward for not looking at him. She looked back. “It’s good for flying under the radar.”

He smiled ruefully. “I’m used to dealing with egos the size of a frigate,” he said. “Comes with the territory, I suppose. You’re a surprising breath of fresh air, Aranth’ess’an-”

“You can call me Thessa,” she interrupted quickly, her fingers clenching tight to the fabric of her trousers. There was too much intimacy in the way he said her name so easily, as if he knew her and knew who she was and was entitled to her full name. His understanding hurt her, made her feel more vulnerable than Hunter had ever managed.

Kothe rested back on his elbows, long legs splayed across the steps. “Well, Thessa,” he said, very carefully pronouncing even the shortened name correctly, “who are you, really?”

Breathing was hard- it felt like there were iron bands around her chest, constricting her lungs, tightening around her bones, squeezing the life out of her. “Who are _you_ , Ardun?” she countered, not comfortable with how at ease he was. Was he relaxed because he didn’t find her a threat, or was he relaxed because he respected her? “I rather thought that becoming a Jedi was a lifetime commitment.”

“There’s more flexibility for us than a Sith,” he admitted, “which I imagine is the arrangement you’re more accustomed to. We certainly don’t take to slaughtering our weaker Force sensitives and send them in to hiding.”

Her spine turned to steel; it was obvious he was talking about Raina. As far as she knew, the only people who were aware of Raina’s gift were her crew, Raina’s family, and the chiss Raina had served with on Hoth. The thought that there could have been someone within such a small circle of witnesses willing to offer Raina’s secrets up to the Republic... “But, then again, you certainly don’t flinch away from slaughtering millions of innocents in order to place a decisive blow against your enemies,” she said pointedly, bitterly. 

“I’m not a perfect man, Thessa,” he said honestly. “There’s a reason I don’t serve as a knight anymore. Good people do bad things when they’re desperate- I would have thought that, of all people, you might understand what that’s like.”

“I have done many things I regret in hindsight,” she said, unable to look at him at the confession. “But I have never resorted to thinking that weapons of mass destruction were in any way a force of good.”

“You gambled the lives of millions against the tyranny of a mad Sith Lord,” Kothe said, grimacing and shifting, as if a step was pressing awkwardly into his back. “You sacrificed control of Jadus’ machines in order to trap him, and in the end you lost him anyway. If that gamble had gone badly-”

“But it didn’t,” she snapped, her skin crawling at the memory. She still had nightmares about that mission, still woke in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, the horrified accounts of the survivors still whispering in her mind, shadows still flickering in the corners of the room. Vector would murmur quietly to her, soft descriptions of the gentle songs he heard between stars, lulling her back to sleep; the whispers were never gone for long though. “I didn’t-” 

“You actively made a choice that weighed the lives of millions against the threat a Sith Lord posed, which is no different to what I had to do with the Shadow Arsenal.”

Thessa bit into her lip until she tasted blood. “You can believe that if it gives you peace, Kothe. I have enough difficulty living with my own demons without having to bear witness to yours too.”

The hum of the engines and the crackle of the energy field were the only sounds in the room, and Thessa preferred it that way. She didn’t know why she’d agreed to speak to Kothe at all; she knew she was only a hair trigger away from collapsing, from bursting into tears and dissolving, broken beyond repair. She couldn’t afford to do that in front of the Republic spymaster. 

“I’m sorry,” he said abruptly, and there was enough pain in his voice for her to accept it as sincere. “For everything. I’m sorry for the way we- I- treated you when you came to us in the beginning. I’m sorry that I allowed Hunter to abuse that power over you. You never gave me a moment to doubt you, and you deserved better than that.”

Thessa stared at the floor and said nothing. 

Kothe shifted again, uncomfortable. “As a Jedi, it’s a privilege to look at the world around me and see the goodness in everything. To see the Force at work, and the beauty in life. I think, somewhere along the way, I lost that... I forgot to look for it. There’s a good and decent heart in you, Thessa, and I took advantage of that. I’m so sorry.”

Oh, it was so hard to fight back the tears in that moment.

She took a deep breath. “I was- _am_ \- a biochemical engineer,” she said softly. “A chemist, really. I thought... I thought we were doing good things. I thought we were working on vaccines, on improving the quality of life of people across the empire.”

Kothe was silent; she didn’t doubt that he already knew this, that it would have been extensively covered in the file the SIS held on her. Either Hunter would have acquired the information, or Keeper would have made sure it leaked ahead of her faux defection. 

Her eyes were burning, and she rubbed at them with her fingertips, willing the tears to stop. “But we weren’t,” she said, ashamed of how badly her voice shook. “They had multiple teams of scientists, all of us working without any knowledge of the others, and they were using us to develop biological weapons to use on...” She trailed off and shook her hand angrily, gesturing to the roof. “The Republic. The Empire. Local populaces needing to be contained, I don’t know. I never asked. We were all just a part of a greater puzzle, and we never got to see the finished product.

“I noticed discrepancies coming through on some of the test reports- samples returning errors, files going missing. It didn’t take me long to realise that one of my colleagues was sending information to the Republic, and I turned her in.”

“What happened to her?” Kothe asked quietly.

She shook her head, her lips pressed together desperately. “I don’t know,” she whispered. “But it wasn’t long after that that Intelligence contacted me, and it wasn’t until later that I thought to look into the files on my recruitment.” 

“And that’s when you realised what you’d been working on.”

“I had no idea,” she whispered, the same of it weighing down on her. “And I had to wonder- did she know? Was she selling our weapons to the Republic, or was she warning them?”

“Regardless of which it was, she invariably saved lives with her decision,” Kothe said kindly. “If she was selling the research, it at least gave the Republic a chance to study it and build their own vaccines and defenses. And if they were hoping to turn it back against the Empire, well- by the sounds of it, you were already a part of a vast network of scientists who were well and truly equipped to handle that sort of crisis.”

A hysterical sound bubbled out of her, something like a laugh. “You make it sound so noble,” she said raggedly, “as if I weren’t contributing to something that could obliterate millions of lives across the galaxy on the whims of a Sith.”

He was silent for a moment, as if considering her words. “So what it comes down to is us,” he said, “a washed up old Jedi with dirty hands, and a scientist from an independent empire running errands for the Sith. We make quite a pair.”

She risked glancing at him, and he was smiling gently at her. She couldn’t bear it, and she looked away. 

“We could do good things, Thessa. There’s good in the Empire, if a person like you can sit so close to that nest of vipers and come out with a decent heart. And there’s work to be done in the Republic- I’m not gonna make excuses for the wrongdoing that’s gone on under our noses. If you believe that we can make a difference, we could-”

“I don’t believe in the Republic,” she said quietly, looking very deliberately at the floor space between her feet. 

Kothe was silent, weighing his response carefully. “Do you believe in the Empire?” he asked finally.

Thessa couldn’t look at him; she had to clench her teeth to stop the anger and the bitterness and the hysterical anguish from pouring out. She could feel it, in her mouth and under her skin, a vile torrent of heat and poison that made her feel like she was splitting open.

“I can feel your pain, Thessa-”

“You don’t know _anything_ about my pain,” she hissed miserably from between her teeth. She heaved in a breath, trying desperately to hold back the wave inside of her, but the simple act of speaking had been too much. She crumbled, dissolving into sobs that wracked her entire frame, tears that snatched the air from her lungs and made her bones ache and her throat close up in panic. 

She’d never imagined that loss could hurt so much; better that she lose a limb than to suffer through this agony. At least an injury, however grave, could heal in time, and life could go on. How could she be expected to go on when her soul was in tatters, her heart and her trust brutalised and left broken and bleeding?

And then Kothe was kneeling before her, talking softly to her- she had no idea what he was saying, she couldn’t make out the words- and his hands were around hers, warm and callused and large, and he didn’t seem at all perturbed by her hysterical turn. As the tears poured from her and the grief washed through her, she clung to him, to his hands, to the lifeline he provided. 

She was so very lost, and she didn’t know how a Jedi had come to be her chance at salvation. 

She wept, and he let her hold onto him.


End file.
